Nursing News

ANCC Magnet Nurses of the Year™ Winners Announced

October 15, 2012 - The American Nurses Credentialing Center’s (ANCC) National Magnet Nurse of the Year™ awards recognize the outstanding contributions of clinical nurses in each of the five Magnet® Model components: Transformational Leadership; Structural Empowerment; Exemplary Professional Practice; New Knowledge, Innovations & Improvements; and Empirical Outcomes. The 2012 award winners were recognized at the ANCC National Magnet Conference® in Los Angeles.

Nancy Tomczak, a certified oncology nurse, epitomizes the characteristics of a transformational leader as chair of the Nursing Practice Congress (NPC) at MD Anderson Cancer Center. She revolutionized the NPC by bringing in multidisciplinary members, resulting in increased engagement and a global vision for de-compartmentalizing clinical issues in order to achieve workable, interdisciplinary solutions. Tomczak devotes equal attention to research and evidence-based practice, nurse advocacy and mentoring, and a commitment to high-quality care. Her research resulted in a grant-funded physical activity program that engages both patients and staff. In 2011 she received the hospital’s highest nursing award, recognizing her outstanding delivery of hands-on care and excellence in daily contact with patients in the clinical setting.

Linda Robinson is an emergency room nurse whose passionate mission against workplace violence has endeared her to emergency nurses at the local, state, and national levels. Her quest began as part of the Emergency Nurses Association’s Workplace Violence Work Team and led to subsequent national roles. She championed legislation to make it a crime to assault an ED healthcare worker in Kentucky, testifying before the Kentucky Senate Judiciary Committee and the Kentucky House of Representatives. The bill passed unanimously and was signed into law earlier this year. Robinson is an inspiration for clinical nurses who want to identify a problem, take action, and champion significant change on a broad scale. Page 2 of 3

Described as an innovator and role model by her peers, Melanie Simpson has dedicated her nursing career to the prevention and alleviation of pain. As Pain Management Resource Team coordinator, she incorporates evidence-based pain management strategies into practice. Certified pain management nurses meet with patients, identify risk factors, and collaborate in order to provide individualized treatment plans. Robinson also founded the Coalition for Comprehensive Pain Management, in which hospital clinicians and representatives from the university and schools of medicine, nursing, and health professionals convene quarterly to discuss the latest evidence-based pain management research. She uses her breadth of clinical knowledge to educate others about evidence-based pain management.

After caring for a young child who suffered hours of intractable pain prior to her death, Kathy Sheehy worked with parents, physicians, and the nursing professional practice council to develop a new protocol for the safe use of dexmedetomidine outside the critical-care setting. The protocol allows children and families to choose the hospital setting for end-of-life care without compromising safe, effective pain and symptom management, while protecting the RN’s legal scope of practice. A strong advocate for patient- and family-centered care, Sheehy is working with the University of Wisconsin and International Council of Nurses to develop an International Classification for Nursing Practice Catalog on Pain Management for the Pediatric Population.

In her self-defined role as an intensive-care provider with the medical ICU/surgical trauma ICU physicians and a certified critical-care clinical nurse specialist, Joanna Emmons has championed excellence in empirical outcomes. She established a preflight checklist for ICU nurses that reduced catheter-associated urinary tract infections well below national benchmarks, led an evidence-based “early warning scoring” project that reduced code blue events outside critical-care units by 40% and increased calls to the rapid response team by 20%, led an evidence-based project that reduced central line-associated bloodstream infection rates by 67%, and led a peripheral intravenous saline locks initiative that saves the health system more than $1 million annually.